


To Die Just A Little

by Funkspiel



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Kidnapping, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Obscurial!Graves, Psychological Torture, Torture, Transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 07:47:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10532043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Funkspiel/pseuds/Funkspiel
Summary: Although the Obscurial is dead, Grindelwald's work with Credence Barebone was not completely a lost cause. After all, now he knew that it was possible for an Obscurus to survive in an older host. Thatageled topower.So three days after his capture, Grindelwald escapes - and he has a plan for a certain Director of Magical Security and the Obscurus he had plucked from Newt Scamander's case.





	

They hold Grindelwald all of three days before one of his lackeys somehow managed to infiltrate the building and spring him from his cell. One second Newt is standing with Tina, getting ready to make off for the docks together and the next, he’s on his knees and staring up into the mad eyes of one of the most dangerous wizards of their time.

“Such a devoted batch of aurors,” Grindelwald sneered, spinning on heel and arms raised theatrically to his little band of misfits as he paced the length of the room. All around him, he had aurors on their knees – arms bound and wriggling angrily. He paused to tower over Tina for a moment, and Newt felt something white hot flare in his chest. “You all did about as good a job of containing me as you did of noticing your dear little director was missing in the first place.” Eyes on Tina, piercing and grinning and cruel. “ _Well done_.”

And when she flinched, Newt couldn’t hold himself back any longer.

“Shut up,” he snarled bluntly, even as he knew it was a mistake. Unnatural eyes moved to lock onto him, and he couldn’t help but feel a sheet of icy fear crawl down his back. Despite himself, his chin began to crawl down into the neck of his coat. Grindelwald smiled.

“Ah, Mr. Scamander. I was so hoping you would still be around for this. After all, you are _quite_ integral to what I have in mind.”

Newt blinked and beside him, Tina’s head whipped up to stare at Grindelwald with wide eyes.

“What do you mean?” She asked, voice low with fear as she watched Grindelwald bend to grab Newt by the chin, eyes only for him. Making a show of it, relishing off their fear and anger.

“Who knows,” he said, thumb stroking the soft jut of Newt’s chin as he forced eye contact with the man. “Maybe you can succeed where these fools failed.”

“What--?” Newt started, voice lost on a breath before Grindelwald suddenly transferred his grip from his chin to his shoulder and hefted him up onto his feet.

“Keep these _honorable_ men and women at bay for me, gentlemen,” Grindelwald said to his men as he brought Newt into the center of the room. “Mr. Scamander and I have a date with the director.”

“Mr. Graves?!” Abernathy gasped, eyes wide and looking up for the first time since falling to his knees. “He’s alive?”

“Newt, no! Let him go!” Tina shouted overtop him, struggling against her bonds until one of Grindelwald’s men came and placed an arrogant boot against the place where her arms were bound to her back and _pressed_. She bit her lip, but Newt could see how it hurt her.

“Stop it!” Newt shouted and yanked against Grindelwald’s hold on him, but the mad man just yanked him back – grasp firm on his upper bicep.

“Let’s go, Mr. Scamander,” he said into Newt’s ear, so close that Newt could tell the man was smiling from the way his lips touched the shell of it. “We wouldn’t want to keep history waiting.”

Forceful apparition had never been something Newt was fond of. Even as respectfully as Tina had done it at their first meeting, it had left him dizzy and overwhelmed. But at the hands of a wizard as powerful and uncaring as Grindelwald, it left him ten times worse. He barely had a moment to gather his wits, however, before Grindelwald started dragging him down a long, dark corridor.

Wherever they were, it was a dark place.

The scars from extended use of black magic had left the building a mere corpse of its former self. All around him, the wallpaper peeled from the walls in thick, tattered, discolored strips. The paintings no longer moved, their enchantments too warped to contain the normally cheerful visage they would typically retain. The carpets smelled of mildew and were pulled bald in some places. The floors creaked and the walls moaned and all around him, the horrible aftermath of illegal arts made itself known. Newt shivered.

“What was this place?” Newt asked, his voice so tentative it made him sick with himself. But he couldn’t help but feel small in the face of so much darkness. He wondered if he lit a candle here, if it would even stay lit. Surely no light could last here.

Beside him, Grindelwald looked oddly pleased.

“The Graves ancestral summer home,” Grindelwald said, “Buried deep into the mountains. I learned of its existence while tinkering around in the dear director’s mind. He was trying to throw useless information my way in an attempt to protect state secrets. He knew that if he couldn’t keep me out of his mind, he could at least keep me preoccupied. Such a clever little thing.”

Newt gasped as they exited the hallway only to enter the center of the home – the room tall and large and seething so deeply with darkness Newt thought he might vomit at any moment. With a tug that nearly took Newt off his feet, Grindelwald brought him to the foot of the grand staircase and stopped.

“So I decided to show the director that _any_ information he gave could be used against him. Just to remind him of who he was dealing with,” Grindelwald said, and as he trailed off, Newt realized the man was waiting for him to peel his eyes off the floor and look up.

So tentatively, he did.

The stairs went up one half-flight before diverging on either side to continue onto the second floor of the house, and at the top of that half-flight hung the stained remains of a large ancestral portrait. In it stood two figures – a man and a woman. Once upon a time, maybe there had been more. Once upon a time, maybe they had been _happy_ as they looked out onto the grand entrance of their family estate. Able to watch young ones scamper across the halls and relatives enter to relax for the summer months.

Now, they stood wrapped in each other’s arms. The woman, no doubt the late Lady Graves, had her face buried into the expensive shoulder of Lord Graves’ shoulder. It was the only portrait that was still animate, Newt realized, because in it he could see how her shoulders trembled in her grief. He could hear the soft breathy whispers of her sobs. He let his gaze trail up only to jump when he realized that the late Lord Graves was staring directly at him.

And _Merlin_ , he looked just like Graves. Older, yes. Wiser, as such things come with age. More wrinkles around his eyes and the soft plane of his forehead. He had a beard by comparison, but in his eyes and the slick style of his hair Newt could see the resemblance. And in his eyes, he could see the pain – the anger – the helpless defeat. Lord Graves glared at him as though angry that Newt was able to see him and his wife laid low, and Newt couldn’t help but avert his eyes in response.

“Have you come to finish what you started?” The portrait asked, and Newt felt gooseflesh bloom over his forearms because _fuck_ , that sounded just like the voice of the man that had sentenced him to death. Just darker and older and weary.

Grindelwald merely smiled up at them as if they were old friends before pulling Newt along once more.

“Nice to see you again, Gondolphus,” Grindelwald said, each step suddenly alight with a cheery bounce that made Newt feel sick. “How is our dear boy doing today?”

Newt flinched when that just made Lady Graves sob ever so slightly louder. He glanced up just in time to see Graves’ father clutch his mother a little tighter, his eyes alight with a righteous fury that took Newt’s breath away. He was suddenly keenly aware that he was in the presence of a noble breed of wizards – and that whatever he was likely about to see was going to break his heart.

“Burn in hell, Grindelwald,” Gondolphus snarled low beneath his breath. And when Newt passed, he thought he might have caught a softly, hatefully uttered, ‘ _You’re too late_.’

He glanced at the portrait over his shoulder as Grindelwald began to escort him up the right most staircase, but the neither occupant of the portrait spared him another word. Instead, they consoled each other. The Lord Graves’ soft whispers of better times slowly faded away, but Newt couldn’t forget the way Lady Graves was crying or the soft whisper of Lord Graves assuring her that ‘ _our son is strong, my love. He’ll survive this. He’s strong.’_

“He was using the portraits as lookouts, for a while,” Grindelwald said suddenly, breaking Newt’s attention. “They’d tell him when I was coming. When to stop trying to break the wards on his prison and when to pretend to behave. I destroyed them all, when I found out. Except for _them_.”

“You’re disgusting,” Newt breathed, at a loss of any better words in the face of such cruelty.

“Do not weep for the blood of the family that helps imprison their fellow wizard, Mr. Scamander,” Grindelwald sneered through the clenched teeth of his grin, but Newt could tell from the sudden tightness of the grasp on his arm that he best bite his tongue. “A jailor hardly deserves the sympathy of the innocents he imprisons.”

 “And you are no such jailor?” Newt asked despite himself. He braced himself for the blow as Grindelwald stopped their progress to freeze in the hall. But the eyes that fell upon him were full of mirth.

“Of course not,” he said, his grin manic. “I am the one that will set us free, dear boy. Even _him_.”

“What--?” Newt asked, baffled, but had the question torn from his mouth as Grindelwald urged him suddenly faster down the hall.

The darkness grew around him. Suffocating and oppressive – thicker than smoke, slimier than smog. Newt felt it on his skin, thin like oil. He rubbed his face as best he could into the shoulder of his free arm, but nothing was there. No oil, no liquid of any sort. But he could feel it, growing on him like a second skin. His stomach roiled.

“Here we are,” Grindelwald said as he pulled Newt up to a door that had turned a grotesque, burnt black around the edges of its frames – tendrils of inky ichor spreading from its edges and moving slowly inward in an intricate network of spider web like veins. And in the center of the door was an elaborately carved sigil that shined wearily in the low light with a cool, menacing glow.

With a wave of one hand, the sigil disappeared beneath Grindelwald’s palm as though it had never existed – the wood of the door suddenly smooth once more. It was a simple matter of pushing it open, after that.

The moment the door swung open, Newt fell to his knees despite even Grindelwald’s attempt to keep him standing. He vomited beneath the weight of the wall of black magic that rose from the room beyond to engulf him. It was like being hit head on by an Erumpent – all of the wind suddenly forced from his lungs in one large gust. Graves’ anxiety, his sorrow, his pain. The magic that had warped him, chained him, bound him, bled him – _Newt could feel it all_. His stomach twisted and he vomited again, the sound of it wet and horrid in the silence.

“Enough of that,” Grindelwald sneered, disgusted by Newt’s feeble reaction as he once more hefted the magizoologist to his feet. “Do try and focus, Mr. Scamander. I didn’t bring you here to sightsee, after all.”

And then with a thrust, Newt found himself standing at the source of the misery that had slowly brought the Graves’ family home to ruin – the crumbling mind of Percival Graves. Newt felt his stomach seize again, but forced the feeling down.

In front of him was a rather barbaric looking surgical table and on it laid the gaunt frame of MACUSA’s Director of Magical Security. He could barely recognize the man Grindelwald had pretended to be. Beneath the shag of several weeks worth of growth on his jaw and the unkempt mess of his hair, Newt could _almost_ see a resemblance. But all resemblance died at the eyes. Blank eyes that stared up at the ceiling, broken and unblinking even in response to the gentle, unpredictable drip of water that continuously landed with a soft, innocent _plip_ between Graves’ eyes. He was bound tight by several cruel lengths of intricate leather straps, crisscrossing around his body so that his arms were bound tight to his sides and his legs even tighter together. And beneath all those straps, his ragged clothing draped from him loosely. He had lost weight; a dangerous amount of weight.

Newt’s eyes trailed from where the water landed on Graves’ forehead up to the bubble of black water hovering a couple feet up from Graves’ head. It hung heavy and ominous, dripping irregularly onto the man without showing signs of ever depleting. And if that were not enough, there was evidence of other torture. Scars along the man’s forearms, disappearing into the frail tatters of his shirt. The bones of his hands just looked _wrong_. Blood on the table, dried and flakey. A tray of bloodied tools on the far wall. Whips and cat-of-nine-tails and other cruel devices on the walls. A Pensieve in the far corner. Instruments that Newt could recognize from war – machines that simulated bright lights and ear piercing sounds – all off and sitting innocently against the wall.

“You’re a monster,” Newt whispered, unable to manage much more in the face of such cruelty.

“No,” Grindelwald said. “Merely making one. All this time, I had been hunting for the perfect weapon with which to change the tide of the war, Mr. Scamander. I thought Credence could be that weapon. But he was too frail, too untrained, too _broken_. I need an Obscurial that can control itself. That will _listen_.”

“I told you, Obscurials do not survive past the age of ten,” Newt snarled beneath his breath. “Credence was an anomaly. The parasite itself cannot survive without a host. They don’t manifest in adults and children are too young to possibly safely contain such a dark entity – Obscurials and Obscurus _cannot be weaponized._ And even if they could, they’d burn out before you could ever truly use them!”

“So you’ve said,” Grindelwald said, appearing suddenly behind Newt to grasp his shoulder once more – towering over him. “But I had a thought after our little chat in the interrogation room, Mr. Scamander. What if an Obscurus _could_ manifest in an adult?”

Newt balked.

“An adult… Impossible. It only manifests in repressed children. Even if an adult wasn’t trained in magic, if they didn’t develop the Obscurus as a youth, they obviously weren’t repressed dramatically enough to instigate infection. And a trained adult would never have a build up strong enough to instigate the infection in the first place. You would need –“

Newt trailed off, eyes wide on Graves' body as the pieces fell in place.

Behind him, Grindelwald grinned.

“You would need a _powerful_ wizard. The best of their age,” Grindelwald finished for him, fingers trailing off his shoulders as he then made his way to Graves’ side. “You would need to then _suppress_ that energy dramatically. Let it build like water blocked by a dam. You would need to feed it like a fire. Stoke the wizard to use spells he couldn’t cast, to build the pressure in his body until even so much as breathing would make him feel like he was going to explode. And then,” Grindelwald trailed off, eyes on Graves with a startling fondness as he gently brushed back the man’s outgrown bangs. “You’d need to remove his ability to keep himself in check. With such a wealth of magical energy all built up, he’d be prime for hosting such a creature. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Scamander?”

“You’ll kill him,” Newt breathed, only now seeing the way Graves’ veins seemed to slightly glow and pulse and buzz beneath the thin stretch of his skin – silvery and glittering and dangerous. Even from Newt’s distance from the man, he could feel him. Like a bomb about to explode. All of the energy that had been subtly strangling him throughout the house… He had thought it had been the aftermath of Grindelwald’s torture. The scarring of dark magic. No… _it had been Graves._ It had been the accumulation of too much magical energy under the peril of such gruesome torture – desperate and unable to escape. “This… _This is unnatural_. You can’t do this!”

“I can and I will,” Grindelwald said, eyes suddenly intense as he met Newt’s gaze.

“He won’t naturally develop an Obscurus. He’s too old, too—“

“I don’t need him to naturally develop it,” Grindelwald said, cutting him off. “I _have_ one ready for him. Ripe and prime for planting.”

“You have one,” Newt trailed off, heart in his throat as he realized that the Obscurus from his case – the one creature that had not remained when he received his case back from MACUSA’s impoundment – had _not_ in fact been destroyed, but stolen. By a mad man. “ _No.”_

“Yes. And in three days time, I _will_ introduce that Obscurus to our dear director here. I leave it to you to prepare him for the transfer. Do whatever you need to do to ensure that he survives the procedure, Mr. Scamander,” Grindelwald said as he slowly drew away from Graves and rounded the table to stand in front of Newt once more.

“And if I refuse?”

“I’ll start killing aurors. Starting with Ms. Goldstein,” Grindelwald said with a smile, eyes twinkling as he suddenly had a thought. “Or your creatures, for that matter – whatever motivates you best.”

Newt’s lips pursed themselves into a fine line, but he didn’t say a word. At his silence, Grindelwald grinned and clapped him cheerfully on the shoulder.

“Good man,” Grindelwald said as he walked to the door. “Do make sure he survives this, Mr. Scamander. If he dies, I’ll see to it that you take his place.”

He paused at the doorway long enough to vanish the bindings that had kept Newt’s arms tight to the small of his back before giving him a little wink and disappearing through the door. And just like that, the mad man was gone – leaving Newt alone in the dark with the broken shell of Percival Graves.

**Author's Note:**

> Graves is just so pretty when he hurts. I've wanted to explore this concept for a long time now - finally got around to it.


End file.
